Sherman’s march was at the end of the war and at that point they may have been defending their homes but that’s unlikely since the bulk of them were far north of Georgia marching with Lee.
They surely thought that they were defending their homes because they early on bought into the propaganda that the yankees were weak and without the will to fight so early on they didn’t worry about any union invasion. They were fighting for the myth of states rights. They made the first moves and attempted to take Washington, that failed.
If it weren’t for a string of political, inept generals on the union side the rebellion might have been put down much earlier. Then there was McClelland, the southern sympathizer, the MacArthur of his time. It took a while for the north to finally figure out that they needed generals who would fight like Grant and Sherman.
Sherman’s “destruction” was vastly overplayed by the south. His path was necessarily very narrow since he left his supply train behind. The fires that burned Atlanta were mostly set by retreating confederates to deny the union any usable materials. When the union army entered Atlanta, it was already burning. I seem to recall that on the 100th anniversary of Sherman’s march there were magazine articles that noted how the “path of destruction” had been mostly rural and that the few cities affected had quickly recovered, by the beginning of the 20th century. In 1964, Atlanta and other southern cities were booming centers of commerce and had been for years. Certainly not 100 years to come back.
The path of Sherman was narrow, his foraging parties relatively large to be able to defend themselves from Wheeler’s cavalry, and his destruction focused on larger plantations, because there a slave could always be found to reveal where foodstuffs were hidden. Sherman’s orders were to only burn houses if the were fired on from such houses.
By contrast, southern deserters moved in smaller groups, were able to range more widely, mostly ransacked smaller properties, burned them to hide the evidence of their crime, and were not accompanied by a reliable officer, so they were more able to indulge in rape and murder as well as theft.
Just as the southern partisans blame the burning of Atlanta on Sherman, despite fires set at the orders of pretended confederate general Hood that destroyed most of the town, they also blamed destruction and crimes wrought by southern deserters on Sherman’s bummers.
I was in the South in 1950’s and I can attest to the fact that even them the parts of the South that Isaw was still a backwater